


Reach

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 22:34:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16105190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.





	Reach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



David kisses him, and it’s a little like coming to life. 

Frank knows better than most anyone that love is not real. Love is a poetic ideal, a concept of some far-off and unattainable dream. Men like them don’t get things like that; the dead reach up with bony fingers and take what they can, but no dead man has ever seized upon love.

And they are dead men. No change in legal status can help that – you spend long enough hiding and the idea of being free starts to hold its own terror. Frank knows David spends long stretches of time in his basement, cutting himself off from Sarah and the kids, after everything he did to come back to them. Part of him, ohh, part of him wants to throttle David for it, wants to kick the shit out of him, because he  _has them_ , he is  _home_. 

Mostly though, he just understands. All those windows upstairs, all the natural light, all those vulnerable openings through which the world can gaze in and see him, alive and whole and so imminently  _killable_. 

David hides in the basement. Frank hides in plain sight. It’s the same, really. Under the veneer of their resurrection, and Frank wonders if this were true of Lazarus stepping out from his tomb, too, both know they are still dead men walking. 

There was a time, a long, long time ago – it feels like life times ago, and in a way, it is – when Frank had believed, really believed in a higher power. Not the God of his parent’s church, but not the amorphous, indifferent Thing that set it all in motion billions of years ago and left humanity to sort itself out, either. He’d  _believed_  in salvation, in providence, in doing good for good’s sake. 

It wasn’t in him to see that anymore. There was no loving God. No one to hear the challenge of their questions, and revel when they sparred with Him. A God that cared and loved wouldn’t allow for the kinds of suffering Frank had witnessed.

But there’s a beauty in other people’s belief. There’s a seductiveness to the comfort of another’s conviction. So Frank lets David talk him into going to temple some nights, and he listens to the songs, the prayers, half in a language he doesn’t understand but that sounds hollowly familiar, and when they leave, David seems lighter, stiller, no longer looking for the escape route. 

David kisses him, and it’s a little like coming to life. 

They’re in the basement, and there are tears on David’s face. They taste like self-loathing and remorse, a flavour Frank is deeply familiar with. They shine, when Frank pulls away, in David’s beard like little lights. He reaches out and gently brushes them away, because David expects him to be rough and he refuses to be. 

“You’re the only one who doesn’t – sometimes they look at me, Frank, and it’s like they’re still looking  _for_ me, like I’m not – like I’m  _wrong_  somehow,” David says, and Frank holds him close and lets him cry, because sometimes there’s God and sometimes there’s real human contact, and Frank knows which comfort he’d pick every time. 

God isn’t real and neither is love, but David is, David and his pain, so much like Frank and his. David clings to him and kisses him, again and again, and every press of lips is like a rolling back of the dark. David kisses Frank until he has no choice but to kiss back. 

“I need you,” David whispers at some point, moving with Frank in the dark, underground where it’s safe for them, safe to be alive. “I need you to love me, because I don’t know if love’s even real anymore but I need it, Frank, I need…”

Frank understands. He lost the ability to believe in love roughly the same time he lost the ability to believe in God. And now here stands David, on the precipice of that frigid apathy. Frank could drag him down with him into that dark loneliness,  _or_  he can reach out for a hand up.

He chooses to reach.


End file.
